Shootouts

Radeon HD 5850 Roundup - Triple Threat

By Kenny Yeo - 23 Apr 2010

Test Setup

Test Setup

We'll be testing the three Radeon HD 5850 cards using our new X58 system:

  • Intel Core i7-975 (3.33GHz)
  • Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard
  • 3 x 1GB DDR3-1333 OCZ memory in triple channel mode
  • Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
  • Windows 7 Ultimate

With the three cards having nearly identical factory clock speeds, we expect performance to be really competitive. Therefore, we'll be paying more attention to how the cooler performs, by comparing their operating temperature against a reference card; and also how much overclocking overhead we can achieve. To spice things up a little, we have also included the Radeon HD 5870 and the new GeForce GTX 470 in our performance analysis.

The full list of cards tested and their driver versions:

  • ASUS EAH5850 TOP 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.3)
  • PowerColor HD 5850 PCS+ 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.3)
  • Sapphire HD 5850 Toxic Edition 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.3)
  • Reference ATI Radeon HD 5850 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.2)
  • Reference ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.2)
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 1280MB GDDR5 (ForceWare 197.17 Beta)

The list of benchmark used are as follows:

  • Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
  • Crysis Warhead
  • Far Cry 2
  • Warhammer: Dawn of War 2
  • Battlefield Bad Company 2
  • "Heaven" from Unigine
  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
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